Orrin's All-Time Top Ten List - Non-Fiction / Conservative Thought

To understand the historic import of this book, which began life as
a doctoral dissertation, it is perhaps helpful to note that a year after
it came out, Lionel Trilling, in his book The Liberal Imagination,
would
maintain that :

[I]n the United States at this time liberalism is
not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.... It is
the plain fact [that] there are no conservative
or reactionary ideas in general circulation...[only]...irritable mental
gestures
which seem to resemble ideas.

Though the sentiment is obviously inane, Mr. Trilling's hubris, and
that of liberals in general, was perhaps understandable in light of the
fact that he wrote at the precise midpoint of the long liberal interregnum
that prevailed from the presidency of Herbert Hoover (1928) until the election
of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The position
of Left intellectuals of that day seems somehow reminiscent of the famed
little old lady who told a physics lecturer that all he had said about
the heliocentric universe was rubbish because :

'The world is really a flat plate supported on the
back of a giant tortoise.'

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying,
'What is the tortoise standing on?'

'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said
the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'

Trilling and company, perched on the middle tortoise, assumed it must
be tortoises all the way up and down. As Russell Kirk amply demonstrated,
they were as wrong as she.

Mr. Kirk begins his survey of Anglo-American conservative thought (he
is even credited with bestowing upon this philosophy the term conservative)
by defining what it generally consists of :

Any informed conservative is reluctant to condense
profound and intricate intellectual systems to a few portentous phrases;
he prefers to leave that technique to the enthusiasm
of radicals. Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma,
and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for
re-expressing their convictions to fit the time. As a working premise,
nevertheless, one can observe here that the essence
of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions.
Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors...;
they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a
spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but
a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were
a machine.
[...] I think there are six canons of
conservative thought--

(1) Belief that a divine intent
rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right
and duty which links
great and obscure, living and dead. Political problems, at bottom,
are religious and moral problems. [...]

(2) Affection for the proliferating
variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing
uniformity,
egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems. [...]

(3) Conviction that civilized society
requires orders and classes. The only true equality is moral equality;
all other attempts
at levelling lead to despair, if enforced by positive legislation. [...]

(4) Persuasion that property
and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic levelling is not
economic progress.
Separate property from private possession and liberty is erased.

(5) Faith in prescription and distrust
of 'sophisters and calculators.' Man must put a control upon
his will and his appetite,
for conservatives know man to be governed more by emotion than by reason.
Tradition and sound prejudice provide
checks upon man's anarchic impulse.

(6) Recognition that change and
reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration
more often than it
is a torch of progress. Society must alter, for slow change is the
means of its conservation, like the human body's perpetual
renewal; but Providence is the proper instrument for change, and the test
of a statesman is his cognizance of the real tendency
of Providential social forces.

He contrasts these core beliefs with those of conservatism's opponents
on the Left, the radicals of all stripes, who believe in :

(1) The perfectibility of man and
the illimitable progress of society: meliorism. Radicals believe
that education, positive
legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods; they
deny that humanity has a natural proclivity
toward violence and sin.

(2) Contempt for tradition.
Reason, impulse, and materialistic determinism are severally preferred
as guides to social
welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors. Formal religion
is rejected and a variety of anti-Christian systems
are offered as substitutes.

(3) Political levelling.
Order and privilege are condemned; total democracy, as direct as practicable,
is the professed
radical ideal. Allied with this spirit, generally, is a dislike of
old parliamentary arrangements and an eagerness for
centralization and consolidation.

(4) Economic levelling. The
ancient rights of property, especially property in land, are suspect to
almost all radicals;
and collectivist radicals hack at the institution of private property root
and branch.

Thus, the playing field. He then goes on to an erudite, idiosyncratic
and altogether beguiling discussion of the chain of men who have defended
conservative ideas and resisted radical impulses from Edmund
Burke, the sine qua non of the Right, to T.S.
Eliot, the great poet and critic. Among the others whose thought
he surveys are : John Adams, Alexander
Hamilton, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Randolph,
John Calhoun, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexis
de Tocqueville, Orsestes Brownson, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Benjamin Disraeli, Cardinal Newman, Henry
Adams, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and George Santayana.
Their styles, their particular concerns, their errors, their failures,
their successes all vary widely, but the core principles that they seek
to vindicate remain, unchanging. Pluck Edmund Burke from the mists
of time and plop him down on Meet the Press this Sunday and he'd
voice the same concerns about our society as he voiced about his own in
the 18th Century. On the other hand, put Karl
Marx on the Today Show and even Katie Couric would tear him
apart. The enemies and the fetid ideologies that the conservative
mind had to contend with were ever changing, a vast array of utopian daydreams
discarded one after another by a Left that never admits the error of its
ways, but merely moves on to the next destructive iteration of radicalism,
secure in the delusion that this next attempt will achieve a "perfect"
society, right here on Earth, while instead leaving piles of corpses in
its blood-soaked wake.

It seems certain that the Left will never bring itself to reckon with
the conservative critique of the whole liberal impulse, but after Russell
Kirk's book, no one can honestly argue that such a critique does not exist.
The very endurance and continuing relevance of conservative ideas suggests
that, in fact, when the intellectual history of the West is written, it
will be conservatism that is found to have been the most powerful philosophical
tradition that our culture created. Whether that history is written
by a free and decent human being may well depend though on the ultimate
success of the conservative mind.

Comments:

I am glad you have included this great book amongst your reviews. However, I think you left out the important point that the conservatism that Kirk is describing is specific to the Judeo-Christian worldview, which is explicitly stated in the book. This is why I am skeptical of U.S. intentions of spreading democracy to every country in the Third World and I think Kirk (and Pat Buchanan) would agree with me. In order to instill true democracy in these areas we must heed the words of Anne Coulter: "convert them all to Christianity".

- Allen

- Jun-14-2003, 10:54

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You quote his six pillars, but you don't comment on them. Do you really endorse his idea that social class is necessary for civilization? Every 'conservative' that I know denies class exists in America.